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Adobe confirms: no Flash for Chrome on Android

Adobe has confirmed that Google's new Chrome for Android browser does not, and …

Google issued a beta release of Chrome for Android earlier today. The browser provides support for modern Web standards and includes a number of compelling features that aren't available in the Android's default browser. One noteworthy Chrome desktop feature that isn't included in the mobile port, however, is the integrated Flash runtime.

Adobe has issued a statement confirming that Chrome for Android does not support Flash content. The company also indicated that it does not plan to work with Google to add Flash support to the new mobile browser. Adobe will, however, continue supporting Flash in the current default Android browser.

"Today Google introduced Chrome for Android Beta. As we announced last November, Adobe is no longer developing Flash Player for mobile browsers, and thus Chrome for Android Beta does not support Flash content," wrote Adobe's Flash Platform product manager Bill Howard.

Adobe struggled for years to make the Flash player plugin viable on mobile devices. Though it was able to make Flash work reasonably well on Android phones, results were mixed on other systems. Due to Apple's unwillingness to allow the Flash plugin on iOS and the difficulty that Adobe faced bringing the Flash player to new devices, the plugin never achieved the same ubiquity on phones that it has historically enjoyed on the desktop.

These setbacks caused Adobe to abandon its mobile Flash player strategy last year. The company announced that it would phase out development of its mobile Flash player plugin and not support it on new platforms. Adobe instead focused its mobile Flash efforts on developing tools for deploying Flash content as native mobile applications. It also strengthened its commitment to native Web standards and acknowledged HTML5 as the way forward for building rich mobile Web experiences.

When Google eventually moves to replace the default Android browser with Chrome in future versions of the Android platform, devices that run the operating system will likely no longer be able to play Flash content in the browser.

140 Reader Comments

If, as has been widely stated, the same Flash sites that desktop clients access can be just as successfully accessed using mobile clients (ie. nothing has changed with the sites), then what other possible reason other than technical can explain why they would support one client class but not the other?

Flash already works well on mobile devices. I own a galaxy tab 10.1, I use it on a daily basis, and I find that flash works fine on the majority of sites. Furthermore, I find, that precisely because Flash works properly on it, I use it signigicantly more for web browsing than I did with my iPad (iPad 1, since sold). With the iPad, I would frequently give up and reach for the laptop. This (honestly) happens a lot less with the galaxy tab, and it's pretty much entirely due to flash.

Are you so obtuse as to think that a company such as Adobe is completely incapable of making flash perform well on a mobile device? There isn't much of a technical reason why it couldn't perform as well as, or better, than HTML5 doing a similar task. Irrespective of whether Flash performs well on mobile right now (I'll concede we disagree on that, even though I have firsthand experience that you clearly don't), the only plausible reason for Adobe not to chase the goal of a supreme mobile flash experience is that the cost outweighs the revenue it would bring. Ergo, it's a business reason.

Taking a step back and consider where this discussion has got to, I'd like to point out that I didn't come here to defend flash. I agree with you that (possibly the majority) of flash content on the web is either content I don't want to see (advertising) or content that doesn't actually need to be flash. There foes however remain a percentage of content which is flash, useful, and inaccessible on Apple's products.

Nevertheless, whilst flash is ubiquitous, a mobile product which is unable to play that content (for political reasons) is to me a product which takes a choice and flexibility away from me. And that, to me, is an inferior product.

An iPhone and iPad which could support flash content, if I wanted it to (albeit through an extra download from the app store), would quite simply be a better product for me, and for a lot of people. I fail to understand why that should bother you - you are, after all, free to not use the flash functionality.

Anyway, this is the point where we shall have to agree to disagree, because it's late, and I am going to bed.

Adobe is completely incapable of making flash perform well on a mobile device?

This is the conclusion that must be drawn. They had years, they failed, Adobe are 100% responsible for the current situation.

That Flash already works sometimes on a few mobile devices while sucking down a whole lot of battery is perhaps a more reasonable claim. But requiring dual core 1GHz+ for OK performance on "the majority of sites" is too little too late.

Losing Flash is bad when HTML 5 isn't even close to ready to take over (as far as I've heard at least).

So if you don't know what you are talking about, why make a comment? Do you know what HTML5 is?

Sigh. Yes, I know what Flash and HTML 5 are. I don't have a point by point comparison of their current capabilities in various browsers and platforms. But I haven't heard anyone say that HTML 5 is ready to take the place of Flash that sounded as if they had the slightest clue about the reality. I don't even know the current state of Flash on Android devices from first-hand experiences. Some people say it's fine, others say it's terrible; some of that may have to do with ability to use the GPU. But I'd rather have the choice while HTML 5 is developed and improved and is capable. I support HTML 5 to replace Flash as I like open standards and development and Flash is limited by what Adobe provides and a few third party attempts to mimic them. But it's blind to presume that HTML 5 is either ready or will eliminate the majority of problems that Flash is blamed for. (Except for browser crashes, where at least an open specification would mean the fault was in the hands of the browser developer, so they could fix it themselves.)

On the one hand, Apple's move, while purely one of self-interest, did help push the market towards HTML 5 (and apps). On the other hand, I prefer the option to choose myself with things like FlashBlock, and let the quality of the experience dictate what I use. A side issue is that it pushed the market towards individual apps that had to be created on a per-platform basis. Another side issue is that I can currently block, at least temporarily, annoying Flash content, and I haven't got an extension that does the same for HTML 5. A nice benefit is that I can open a lot of Flash and cpu heavy pages without bogging my computer down until I want that page to be active. I can open video pages without the video starting automatically.

Transitions are often painful. I'm still getting rid of old technology that even I consider obsolete, so I can understand how a market will hang onto a solution longer than necessary. "Flash is dead" is a meme, not a reality, even if people are trying to make it so. Flash has a lot to answer for, but a lot to offer. HTML 5 is no more the current automatic answer than a reform candidate for political office is.

We chose as our demo a fully playable level from Unreal Tournament 3 and it turned out to look even better than the version we shipped on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, with improvements like global illumination, better shadows, and god rays! We’re not just talking about triple-A console quality on the web, we’re actually showing it onscreen, in a web browser, playing inside Flash!.

There's a demo on YouTube. It's not available publicly as they seem to be waiting for Flash Player 11.2 for mouse lock to better enable a first person shooter. However, they were still able to exceed the graphics of Xbox360 and Playstation 3 inside of Flash Player 11.

Adobe failed to deliver on flash on multiple front :- Failed to deliver a proper cross platform experience, not much their fault, touch screen provide totally different interaction from a mouse.- Failed to keep the flash plug-in from bloating, macromedia originally made it a lightweigth alternative from their already bloated shockwave. Shockwave pretty much disappeared from the face of the web, but flash got more and more features stapled on it (80% at least that user aren't aware of or not using at all in their daily browsing life).- Failed to rethink the flash architecture to be more CPU conservative (on redraw and event polling)

Apple on the other hand got other agenda :- Restrict Cross-platform tools as much as possible- provide a fluid experience on their iphone (which is not what most flash website provide, even on PC that are say 2 years old).- Being a gatekeeper for content being used on the iPhone

Content provider spoiled flash:- by providing obnoxious flash advertising, that is not only distracting for the main experience (that is actually the point of it I think), but is also hogging the CPU, even if the page is in the background.- By using a full site flash "experience" that give no extras compared to an HTML one (still qualified as Lo-Fi in some existing website).- By creating flash content that would rival with Crysis on CPU hogging (but it run fine on my PC/Mac !)

That's a pity because flash actually provided great cross platform in rendering and interaction terms. I consider flash being like VHS and that a good part of the web will disappear with it. Well I guess it's back to dealing with browser compatibility again.

This is the conclusion that must be drawn. They had years, they failed, Adobe are 100% responsible for the current situation.

That Flash already works sometimes on a few mobile devices while sucking down a whole lot of battery is perhaps a more reasonable claim. But requiring dual core 1GHz+ for OK performance on "the majority of sites" is too little too late.

That's the conclusion you've drawn, sure. But the fact of the matter is that you are wrong.

As I said before, until YOU go and get some real first hand experience of Flash on mobile, you're not really qualified to come up with that conclusion.

Perhaps it's time for you to go and troll on other threads, which, looking at your posting history, seems to be mainly what you do here.

Perhaps I expect better from the minds that frequent a site like Ars, but this argument is so senseless as to be comical. Turn that passion toward the future; it doesn't mean you can't continue to use Flash for all its strengths, and make money doing so in the short term, but if you're not studying every opportunity to move away from it, you'll end up no better than some 50-something "tech professional" scouring the want ads looking for jobs programming in Visual Basic.

Let it go, and embrace a new challenge. This is why we're "geeks," remember? To create new tools and solve new problems. Desperately hanging on to fading ideas is what the rest of the world does.

I hate to rain on your arrogant crap parade but the 'minds' that frequent Ars have in many cases had to put up with the total nightmare that is HTML5, a mess of standards nobody fully supports, and have recognised that Flash isnt being beaten by a valid competitor its being removed by companies that dont like it being in the way.

This isnt looking to the future, this is a repeat of netscape specific vs IE specific standards with a dozen companies with a dozen different agendas all vying for power over the way the web works, only this time its many times more complicated, many times worse.

You know when CSS2 came out? 1998... it took over a decade for all the browsers to support it and its not a particularly strict or even good standard (Take a look at the quantity of default code you need to ensure consistent display of information.) You think this is going to be better now that there are a dozen or so technologies and more in the pipeline? Are you people really that naive?

Flash is crap but it did a job that HTML5 doesnt come close to and wont come close to for the foreseeable future (and no, tech demos by googles team of expert programmers and artists that often only work in chrome anyway are not an indication of how the standards work in the real world.) and all you clowns calling it for its death seem to be completely oblivious to this fact.

You dont throw out the tool that did a job badly and replace it with a whole tool box that doesnt do the job at all, I dont give a damn how shiny you think the new tools are.

Are you so obtuse as to think that a company such as Adobe is completely incapable of making flash perform well on a mobile device? There isn't much of a technical reason why it couldn't perform as well as, or better, than HTML5 doing a similar task.

Well, it took them several years (past their own claimed ETA) to get it out on mobile devices at all, and it still gets very mixed performance reviews. And they've had a decade and a half to get it to work well on Macs, and haven't managed that, so, yeah, I do suspect that there may be inherent qualities to the software that make it impossible to get good performance without a complete compatibility-breaking re-write. The alternate explanation is that they didn't really try--which, given both their PR campaign in favor of Flash, and the powerful incentive to prevent exactly what is currently happening (the decline of Flash), not to mention potential revenue along the way, seems really unlikely. [I'm aware that on the Mac side, part of the issue may be Apple not making available low-level access that they have on MSWindows--I don't have sufficient technical expertise to judge whether that is Adobe asking for unreasonable things, or Apple refusing reasonable things.]

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An iPhone and iPad which could support flash content, if I wanted it to (albeit through an extra download from the app store), would quite simply be a better product for me, and for a lot of people. I fail to understand why that should bother you - you are, after all, free to not use the flash functionality.

I speak only for myself, but: it would bother me because, had Flash been accessible on iOS devices, we might not now be seeing its decline, and I have considered Flash a bane on the internet experience for...17? years now?--I managed to avoid even installing it for the first 5 or so, before it became sufficiently common that I occasionally needed it.

I have mixed feelings about the events that led to the decrease in reliance on Flash online, and don't like some of the side-effects (in particular, the proliferation of site-specific "apps" to serve content, rather than simply making a Flash-free website, or otherwise optimizing to accommodate small screens, is really a step in the wrong direction, IMHO), but, overall, I think the web is a better place now than a few years ago because of this change, and the less Flash is used--and, particularly, used unnecessarily--the better.

There's a demo on YouTube. It's not available publicly as they seem to be waiting for Flash Player 11.2 for mouse lock to better enable a first person shooter. However, they were still able to exceed the graphics of Xbox360 and Playstation 3 inside of Flash Player 11.

If that turns out to be more than a Flash wrapper around the native Windows code, I'll be very surprised. We shall see when (if) there's a public release.

If a technology has no value, it will disappear on its own. It doesn't need a single person in a position of power to come along and push it out by simply announcing it is bad.

Well, then, I guess that if a technology has no value, it doesn't need anyone to push it or support it? Jobs was a big fan of HTML5, which he chose to compare directly to Flash so that he could halfway explain why he didn't want to support Flash in Apple's mobile devices--so does that mean HTML5 has no value, too, because it requires people to push and support it?

You are right, though--the problem was that Jobs didn't explain himself to the degree that his sentiments came off as coherent--Jobs frequently waxed emotional at the drop of a hat. Apple's (and everyone else's mobile devices, too) simply aren't "Flash Ready," if you will. That is, in mobile devices everything is at a premium, like ram and battery life, which means that the mobile hardware environment *in general* is a hostile environment for Flash. So it was never so much a question of Jobs just refusing to run Flash in Apple's mobile devices as it was of Apple's mobile devices *being unable* to run Flash with any degree of reliability or speed.

Bottom line is, regardless of a technology's apparent worth or lack of it, it's not going anywhere unless people make conscious decisions to support it. How do you think Flash *became* ubiquitous on the desktop? It was "good enough" to garner developer support out of the yin-yang.

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Good developers use the best tool for the job. When allowed fewer tools to choose from, certain types of experiences won't be done as well (or at all).

Well, when comparing the mobile browser market to the desktop browser market, I think there are both obvious and subtle differences between the two environments that necessitate differing slates of tools (for differing tasks.) As a program, though, Flash is just not fundamentally suited to mobile environments as stated above.

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Bad developers create crappy experiences no matter what tool they're forced to write in. But take away the tools they know best and you reach new lows in terms of quality. You don't stop them from creating their content. You just make that content even worse.

Problem is, though, that Flash is simply an ill-suited application for mobile-device environments. This has nothing at all to do with whether one thinks Flash is a "good" program or a bad one. The problem was that from the start Jobs did not frame his Flash remarks accurately, but framed them in a frankly somewhat deceitful manner. The quality of Flash, even as it appeared to Jobs, had nothing to do with Jobs decision not to support it in Apple's mobile devices. Always with Jobs it was "bait 'n switch"--you had to really keep your eye on the cup when Jobs was moving the pebble around...

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In short, forcing Flash, Unity and other plugins out as Steve Jobs did does not benefit the web. It is incredibly short-sighted and highly presumptuous to state that nobody could possibly have a legitimate use for a given tool. If that is indeed the case, the tool will fall out of use on its own.

Jobs hasn't forced anything out... Flash is currently installed on literally *billions* of desktop machines (including Macs!) and is likely the most widely used standard of its kind on the Internet. And, you don't become an Internet standard because of being rotten, Swiss-cheese software--if Flash was that bad it wouldn't be useful to anybody and would never have made it to first base, let alone have become a desktop standard.

I will agree, though, that Apple fans might have been prone to leap and then look when it came to the utterances of Jobs, but they've always been a distinct minority in the world markets. Apple's mobile cell-phone/device (non OS X) users, otoh, are of a much different persuasion. The majority there likely cannot spell HTML5 and are likely undisturbed by that fact...

Jobs kind of messed up the issue for everyone when he coined an emotional, partisan response to what is simply a straightforward issue of hardware resources available--namely, that Apple doesn't offer enough in the way of suitable hardware resources to support Flash in Apple's mobile environment. Neither does anyone else's mobile environment. What a simple statement that is to make--Jobs could not possibly have befouled this issue more intensely than he managed...

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Years ago, plugin support was added to browsers because browser makers realized that by opening innovation up to the world at large, they would allow more functionality to be created than they could possibly hope to add on their own. That fact has not changed, but Apple and Microsoft have changed their attitude. They now want sole control over that innovation.

OK, Apple has always been the "walled-garden" king of computerdom, but as far as your remark concerns Microsoft--you lost me. Everyone knows and it is fairly well documented that if Steve Jobs could have interposed himself physically between every Mac owner and his monitor and mouse, then Jobs would have done so in order to demonstrate to the Mac customer how he's doing it wrong so that Jobs could teach him to do it right...!

Again--this is *not* an issue of Steve Jobs arbitrarily choosing to "kill off" a popular piece of 3rd-party software. Jobs simply doesn't have that much influence on the markets or on individuals, for that matter--basically, they'd use what they liked and if Steve didn't like it why that was just too bad--for *him*.... Jobs had as much chance of single-highhandedly killing off a popular piece of 3rd-party software--like Flash--as he did of successfully mandating that no one ever use Windows again, starting tomorrow. That is, no chance at all.

Flash won't run, either well or at all, on Apple/Google/Samsung/You-Name-it mobile devices because none of those devices provides the minimum in hardware specs necessary to support a Flash software environment as it is supported "natively" on the desktop--where Flash still--gasp, choke--rules the day in terms of that kind of software.

I think we've covered how exceedingly *simple* this entire matter actually is--once we strip off the layers of confusion and babbling partisanship that Steve Jobs loved to apply liberally to almost everything he got involved with at Apple. As well, as revealed in this article, it is *Adobe* which is announcing the termination of any effort on its part to build a Flash program for mobile environments. Adobe does not at the moment deem a Flash version for mobile environments to be worth its time and trouble--namely, of building in a Flash version that manages compatibility with its desktop PC cousins. Who knows what Adobe is doing? It's at least possible that Adobe is working on a fresh program written from the ground up for mobile environments, or maybe Adobe has decided the mobile playground is just too small for its tastes all around--"small" in terms of resource availability, etc. In this press release, Adobe is pretty blunt in that it sees its AIR development and its continuing desktop PC Flash development to be the future of the company. I cannot say I disagree.

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The really clever part was how they managed to get so many people convinced that this was a good thing. After all, what they really got people begging for was, "No more choice! No more choice! No more Choice!"

Again--Jobs has completely mischaracterized everything and led the discussion completely astray! No one is "killing off" anything because Adobe had never implemented a mobile version of Flash to begin with--there's nothing to kill. The desktop version of Flash continues unabated. Mobile devices simply lack the physical resources, in whole or in part, depending on the device, to provide a stable environment for Flash to operate in. HTML5, I'll just gently remind the folks who need reminding, is a web standard that has nothing to do with Flash one way or the other; and it was proposed as an web standard independently of anything Jobs/Apple said or did. Let's all stop confusing Flash with HTML5, for heaven's sake!...

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http://www.noteflight.com/ is a website that offers a unique application for composing music in a browser. It's become a popular free service for students who want to learn composition and be able to share their songs with others. The application is not possible in HTML5, due to its dynamic audio requirements, which include playing looped audio samples while adjusting their sample rate, amplitude envelopes, etc. There is no web application in the world that offers similar functionality. So with the disappearance of Flash on mobile, this genre of software, which has proven to be both popular and educational, is gone from mobiles.

Again, you'd have to ask Adobe about it, but my suspicion is that the amount of work necessary to shoehorn Flash into the mobile browser hardware environment, both on the part of Adobe and on the part of the *device makers*, is prodigious and simply not thought to be worth the effort and expense. Mobile, it should not be forgotten, was *never* conceived as a 1:1 replacement for desktop computing ...! How is it that people get so confused around this one issue? Mobile is designed around *mobility* as a core concept first, everything else being considered second. There are always going to be wide, large areas of *no overlap* in functionality and content and general use between desktop PC tech and mobile tech in general. That's exactly the way it should be, though. And on the desktop, not only is Flash not going anywhere, but HTML5 will be no less available in desktop browsers as it is in mobile browsers.

Flash is simply not, on it's own, a large enough issue to significantly polarise the choice of which mobile platform to buy. People I work with (who have iphones and ipads) are continually frustrated by the lack of flash support, but on it's own that's not enough to make them switch to android.

A bunch of people using android don't know what the fuss is about - they see the same web on their phones/tablets as they do on their desktops. These people tend not to realise that flash just doesn't work on iOS devices.

As a matter of personal experience (as opposed to my technical/news reading), I probably wouldn't know what the fuss is about, either, nor realize that Flash doesn't work on my iPhone. I see pretty much the same web on my computer and my iPhone, with maybe fewer ads on the iPhone. It obviously depends partly on what portion of the web you frequent--I almost never visit any websites, on my laptop/desktop or iPhone, that use Flash, except perhaps in the ads. My GF has an iPad, and I can recall exactly 2 instances in 6mo of her having to put down the iPad and reach for the laptop because of Flash.

The only website I have ever frequented that was a Flash issue was Youtube. And it was always a miserable experience until they switched to support video other than Flash and I got a browser plugin that forced the desktop to load the non-Flash videos, too. When was Flash-only, I hardly used it, because the experience was so lousy. Now I occasionally go on Youtube benders. Oh, wait, I also use Hulu--but less than I would if the experience were more pleasant, and the primary problem is the use of Flash.

The owners of websites don't want Flash, they want to deliver their content to users in a way that is the most effective. Again, the delivery mechanism is important only in regards to the experience it can deliver for an acceptable cost.

Actually, many website owners also want to deliver their content in a way that they maintain control of it--they don't want a user to be able to display it using the font and text size of their choice, or easily search and link to deep pages from external sites. IOW, they want the benefits of a web presence but don't want to play the way the web was intended. I suspect that is as much or more the impetus to Flash webpages/-sites.

There's a demo on YouTube. It's not available publicly as they seem to be waiting for Flash Player 11.2 for mouse lock to better enable a first person shooter. However, they were still able to exceed the graphics of Xbox360 and Playstation 3 inside of Flash Player 11.

If that turns out to be more than a Flash wrapper around the native Windows code, I'll be very surprised. We shall see when (if) there's a public release.

Basically it converts C and C++ code down into ActionScript byte code. So, yes it's not a regular Flash project with ActionScript, but is still using the same APIs. Although I think some custom data types were added into Flash to help support Alchemy.

So this isn't exactly native Windows code, with a Flash wrapper as the game can run on a Mac inside the Flash Player. Note that Flash Player 11 has some really low-level APIs for the GPU, which uses OpenGL on the Mac and DirectX on Windows.

There's also a Wii game that was ported to Flash Player 11, once again using Alchemy to convert C++ into ActionScript bytecode.

Off all the criticisms of Flash, some of which are valid and some not, the one that drives me crazy is when people say 'Flash is obsolete in the mobile environment because it depends on rollovers'. Flash is no more dependent on rollovers then HTML is. I don't if it was Steve Jobs who started this one, but it really is complete misinformation.

Off all the criticisms of Flash, some of which are valid and some not, the one that drives me crazy is when people say 'Flash is obsolete in the mobile environment because it depends on rollovers'. Flash is no more dependent on rollovers then HTML is.

That may be true, but the counter-argument that all Flash web sites would be accessible to (touch-based) mobile devices was false.

Remember that at the time critics panned iOS for not being able to access 'the full Internet'. Well even if it had a fully-functional Flash client, it still would have been unable to interact with rollovers. I have no idea how existing Android devices deal with that one.

This is the conclusion that must be drawn. They had years, they failed, Adobe are 100% responsible for the current situation.

That Flash already works sometimes on a few mobile devices while sucking down a whole lot of battery is perhaps a more reasonable claim. But requiring dual core 1GHz+ for OK performance on "the majority of sites" is too little too late.

That's the conclusion you've drawn, sure. But the fact of the matter is that you are wrong.

Wait a year and let's see. Sorry that what you know is going away, but Flash is dead. I'd be annoyed too if I was a Flash developer but Adobe is the company you should be angry at, nobody else.